jeff's blog

At Sakura Media, my co-worker and I pumped out a site called Tiny Memorial, a website for creating online memorials for pets or people. We built the project relatively quickly. We started work a Thursday afternoon and launched the product on the following Wednesday afternoon.

The application was fairly simple to design because there are other online sites out there. The difference between the other sites and Tiny Memorial is that this site was “bootstrapped” by using a panoply of technologies and we have some social networking features that the other guys don’t.

Django 1.4 — Bleeding-edge Django tech. We were working on a RC candidate version and 1.4 became stable a few days after we launched.

Twitter Bootstrap 2 — I really like working with Bootstrap. The engineer did an amazing job of making making the CSS really flexible. I aspire to achieve this level of CSS modularity/reusability. Visually, Bootstrap out-of-the-box is also great. All the UI elements and buttons are just there and I barely messed with them at all. In fact the ugly greenish yellow gradient for the header is all my choosing.

Compass — Ruby tool that compiles SASS and has a ton of ways to make life easier including cross-browser CSS3. I use Compass so much I haven’t used a -webkit prefix in months.

Facebook integration — When Facebook users create a new memorial we push the content onto their timeline. Fun stuff.

Since Facebook changed everything over to Open Graph they deprecated the pyfacebook library. This stack exchange thread suggests Facepy. Everybody else suggests using the Javascript API but I really just wanted something easy on the backend to execute a few curl requests per user action on the back end in my Django app. I haven’t used this library yet but we’ll see where it goes.